In recent times the purchasing of promotional products by companies or other organizations has grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, it is now the case that divisions within an organization and certain locations of an organization may purchase their own specific promotional products. Because of the ad-hoc and dispersed nature of these purchases, the purchasing of promotional products is typically not controlled or managed inside an organization, nor is the purchasing accounted for in any consistent manner.
Typically, promotional products are purchased by individuals in specific locations or departments inside an organization rather than by any sort of centralized procurement or purchasing department. In many cases, however, many buyers inside the same organization are looking for the same or similar types of products during the same time period, completely unaware of other individuals' efforts or desires to obtain these products as well. Additionally, as the purchasing of promotional product may not be centralized there may not a uniform application of corporate or organizational guidelines regarding the purchases of promotional products such as rules regarding the use of organizational brands, trademarks or the like.
As a result there may be many individuals within an organization spending time, effort, or money trying to obtain similar types of products, without communicating with each other and without applying the appropriate organizational brand guidelines. This distributed purchasing of similar promotional products may mean that the combined purchasing power of all the buyers may not be leveraged and that organizational guidelines may not be uniformly applied with respect to the purchasing of promotional products (similar or otherwise). Furthermore, in some cases an organization may be so small that no matter how many people within an organization desire to purchase a product it may be difficult if not impossible to achieve volume based discounts based only upon purchases made by buyers within that organization.
Some companies try to coordinate and manage their buying through “corporate web-stores” for promotional products. These online stores may allow buyers to purchase promotional products that have been approved by corporate and that meet corporate guidelines. However, the static nature of such stores does not meet the constantly changing demands of purchasers of promotional products. As a result, buyers of promotional products are loathe to utilize such corporate web-stores and may look elsewhere for their promotional products. Thus, such stores typically only receive a small percentage of the total corporate purchase volume. Moreover, even if such stores are utilized by buyers within an organization a sufficient volume of product to achieve any sort of economies of scale may not be achieved by buyers within the organization.